


A Dirge of Daemon Deaths

by tsunderestorm



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Final Fantasy XV Headcanon, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:48:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21651748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsunderestorm/pseuds/tsunderestorm
Summary: The King of Light was not the first Lucian king to battle hordes of daemons. The Warrior fought them, chronicled them, and in his madness, died so that we may know how best to overcome them. This is his story.
Kudos: 2





	A Dirge of Daemon Deaths

**Author's Note:**

> This piece was written for the [Cosmogony zine](https://twitter.com/cosmogonyzine), which was an incredible project filled with very talented creators and very passionate and amazing mods! As my era was "The Kings of Lucis", I chose to write about The Warrior, creating a possible story to fill in the holes we are presented in canon! This type of lore-heavy, fairy tale-inspired way of telling a story really drew me into this project and it was an absolute joy to be a part of.
> 
> Cael did a spectacular illustration of The Warrior's stained glass window that you can view [here](https://twitter.com/kingcael/status/1201268073082146816?s=20).

_“I caught a glimpse of it again today. A bandaged face white as a bride’s veil and mouth black as pitch where its unholy breath stained the wrappings. The sword at its hip drips with her blood...I can feel it. Death and destruction aren’t enough for this one. I’m going to catch it, overwhelm it, take it bound and subjugated to Sybil..._

_If she’ll still see me._

_She will. She has to...and I know she can help me. I’ll make her heal it enough to restore it to good health so I can hurt it over and over. I see it every night in my sleep and before I wake in the morning, I’ve killed it one hundred times. This nightmare must come true, for all the dreams of ours that could not. Only when I’m satisfied that it has suffered even a fraction of the pain it caused Selinde, I will I send it to the depths of hell with every other malformed imp and skeletal wraith my blade has banished. Every other creature I’ve recorded in this journal in the hopes that no one need suffer at the hands of the daemons the way we have._

_Only then will my suffering be over.”_

\- Excerpt from one of Marcellus Lucis Caelum’s travel journals. Included on the page is a crude illustration of what our modern bestiary called a “Ronin”, detailing the hand position it takes when it is about to strike. 

***

There was a time when daemons were a myth, an old wives’ cautionary tale whispered in the ears of children to send them running home by curfew. Everyone knew that daemons had been banished from the land by the Founder himself, hand in hand with the Oracle whose countenance shone with a radiance to put even the sun to shame. What have we to fear, they wondered, when we have divine protection? When the Lucis Caelum line courses with the ichor of The Draconian himself?

There was always something to fear. Especially in the time early in the days of the scourge’s spread, when darkness’ murky tendrils had just started to get a grip on the Star, Lucis’ forefathers were woefully ignorant. Even when ooze began to drip from pores of the sickened and the nights grew longer by infinitesimal seconds known only to the Oracles, travelers left and never returned. This, they soon grew painfully aware, was something inhuman. Something reaching out from the empirical West that stunk of sulfur and smoke and brought only death in its wake… something supernatural, even daemonic.

Despair brought disorganization. Babes were snatched from beds in homes lacking proper protection and claw marks criss-crossed down the doors of cottages and castles alike. Clothes were found shredded to bits by teeth with no corpses to be found, and the Citadel dispatched teams of hunters each dawn to protect the villages under its wide-sweeping wings. Of course, those efforts were not enough… but they gave the people comfort. 

As with even the most dire of times, the people found happiness: a light in the darkness to banish their fear of the shadows. A Tenebraean born and a Caelum queen she became, Selinde and Marcellus joined their hands in a symbol of peace: the blossoming of the Oracle’s line and the ancient magic of Lucis bound by a tie looped around their hands. The Warrior defied responsibility even then, taking the young royal to wife instead of the elder, the Princess rather than the Oracle. 

Freshly wed, his wife craved adventure instead of the stiff press of a throne against her back. Unfettered by the expectations of her elder sister’s holy position, perhaps she saw her life with Marcellus as an escape, and so their honeymoon - first a week, then one month, and then two - became half a year spent wandering the wilds of the Lucian continent. Brimming with bloodlust for the daemons that had plagued their generation and equal parts bravado and bravery, Selinde and Marcellus were equally matched in swordplay and a fearsome pair to behold.

One wonders if he heeded the warnings. Did the wise whisperings of his advisor fall on deaf ears? _Be not like The Wanderer_ , they surely cautioned, _whose negligence left him distant and out of touch_. We have no way of knowing, not when his diaries after the tragedy show only a man descended into madness, a mercenary hell-bent on a single target. There are some who said he was no proper king, not fitting of the statue that rose to defend Insomnia. 

They were wrong, of course. His statue was crafted with more ancient and powerful magic than even today’s most skilled mage can comprehend, and his likeness would not tower over Lucis like The Tall or stand as strong as The Fierce if he had not been deemed worthy. There are others who were less condemning, who could imagine The Warrior before he became one of our ancient and venerable spirits of the Ring. When he was a young man in love, when the dusty expanse of Leide was a picturesque view uninterrupted by power lines and they could see for miles, when a patch of rich green grass in Duscae made a perfect picnic spot for he and his young bride. When he was less a King, and more a man in love.

Maybe those days of carelessness had a purpose, and he truly was researching the kingdom where the Scourge had begun, or maybe it was as his critics said, and he was shirking responsibility even then, content to spend his days in hedonism when the only activity that required the sharpening of his blade was performing for his lover. We will never know which is true.

What we do know is that tragedy struck, as tragedies do. According to the histories lovingly recorded by his disciples, a wrong turn in the dark lost Marcellus and Selinde in a marsh that must have felt like a maze, and a wayward daemon caught them unaware. Although forged by outside innovation at the time far greater any Lucian smith, the sword in his hand was naught in the face of the daemon that crawled out of the labyrinth’s center. The katana could not stop her demise, and the arms of that ancient and noble Death that all Lucians aspire to one day walk willingly into enveloped his beloved far too soon.

His diary repeats this day over and over, his mind caught in a seemingly unending loop replaying the moment she was struck down. As sweet as any lover’s passionate embrace and twice as deadly as an assassin’s mercy, the daemon’s sword cut through her skin like wet paper and her eyes glazed over before she could even scream. She was dead before she fell into his arms, leaving no blood, just the pall of death as the monster’s unholy screech became her death march. He returned to Lucis with her cold, cold corpse clutched in his arms, eyes wild with the fury that would claim his judgement.

He was not the first king to lose the one he loved most, to know the unique pain of feeling their soul torn asunder as fate steals from the living world the person who holds their heart in gentle hands. He was not the first to sharpen a blade and bless a talisman, nor was he the first to set out under guise of nightfall to wade through the ever-growing, teeming hordes of daemons hidden in caves and lake beds in an attempt to find that which had stolen his lover from him. All across the continent and beyond, parents vowed vengeance on the creatures that clutched their children in poisoned claws and took off into the sky and wives, fueled by the agony of abandonment, swore revenge on the daemons that had claimed their partners.

Of course, as with most things, it was different for royalty. Lucian kings were known to be sound of mind, and with Shield in front and a sword in hand, they were meant to face every challenge with poise and grace, to hold their head high even when they felt like Titan had tricked them into holding up his Meteor. They were meant to be level-headed, cool under pressure, and they did not chase flights of fancy of avenging those whose deaths had become commonplace in the daemon-dotted landscape of the world. The king who rose to claim the moniker of The Warrior almost changed that reputation. 

Frenzied, he gave chase. He shirked the protection of the Shield who had honed his mind and body and set out alone, Selinde’s name of his lips and the image of the wandering creature who had stolen her burned into his eyelids when he closed them in sleep each night. It’s said that he beat his hands bloody on the walls of caves that the strange, stalking creatures disappeared into and tore fingernails climbing walls no human could ever hope to scale, cognizant only of his own desperate desire for vengeance. 

His singular madness taught us that you should never let a wraith see you scream, for the poison enters through the throat and proves weakening and deadly; the reason that even the smallest of imps was to be treated as the most colossal of daemons for their trickery and shadow games; the reason that no hunter was allowed to leave the Lestallum base without a blessed safety bit lest they encounter a species of the fearsome sword-wielding daemons of death.

As he killed each new species, he devoted a section of the Citadel’s great library to the creatures who haunted his nightmares. Each beast he felled with a blade inscribed with his Queen’s name earned a place in his diary, and every page was transcribed each time he returned; a task that, given that the few cult-like disciples who survived the Fall of Insomnia still sing his praises, was not resented. 

He seemed to be missing a piece of himself each time he returned, less man and more machine, speaking in half-sentences and flinching at shadows, always preoccupied with his fixation even when the acolytes pressed him for questions. The monster he called Ariadne, did her summoned minions vanish when the mother host died? He wasn’t sure… he couldn’t remember. The one he’d sketched there, labeled “Hecteyes”, could it survive out of the poison pools he’d found it in? Should they be worried? He couldn’t recall, he’d felled it in a single strike.

The ronin, though - he always had new information about that. It was forever eluding him, always _just_ unreachable by his fingertips when he stretched out his hand to take it by the throat, its stale bandages coming off in his grip like sheets of rotting skin. The daemon left no footprints, he learned, and was hard to track, but its sword screamed like a banshee when drawn from the sheath.

One day, he didn’t return. His disciples waited first weeks, then months, then a year without new pages to transcribe while daemons they knew nothing about prowled the borders, and finally Sybil sealed his fate. Moved as she was by his undying love towards her long-gone sister, her Messenger whispered the will of the Astrals in her ear: a new King was to rise. Marcellus’ tomb was built, a statue sculpted, incantations chanted on the night of a full moon, and he was laid to rest with nothing left of him but the corner of the library that his believers had trusted so strongly in. 

The stained glass atop his shelves of daemonic knowledge still stands today, mercifully untouched by Niflheim’s kidnap of the Crystal and the daemons’ ravaging of the city, the tomes returned to a font of now-useless information that serves only to tell our history. Perhaps its survival is a testament to The Warrior’s tenacity, or maybe it’s simple luck. Perhaps what his disciples once whispered is true: the glass wards the daemons away, that the light streaming through the arrangements of yarrow and coltsfoot speak of a power insurmountable that burns the beasts’ skin as much as the sun.

It is said that the safety bits fashioned by mage-masters of old were imbued with the same magics that bless the pictures on the glass, pictures that still captivate and enchant. At the top, The Warrior in all his splendor,the purple of royalty adorning him with monkshood. A spring wedding below it, panes of green and yellow ivy twining around the King and Queen the same as their hand-tying ceremony. A woman’s crumpled form, body prone on the ground, red panes sprinkled with perfectly modeled asphodels.

Towards the bottom, a malformed, twisted humanoid of a creature, sliced in half by a weapon, the coltsfoot around it a kaleidoscope of ever-changing color when the sun’s light through. In the corner, another sad ending… another death. A king, impaled on a blade, a gently-blown asphodel to match his beloved signifying his end.

When the Long Night descended upon the land, we looked to the blessings of The Oracle, who was bound by the duties of both Caelum and Fleuret for most of his reign, the words of the Pious, whose prophecies helped to foretell predictions in the surge of daemons. We studied the travel diaries of the Wanderer and of course, The Warrior’s fanatical scribblings. Without knowing history one is doomed to repeat it, and without knowing the daemons one is doomed to die to them. Perhaps that was always meant to be The Warrior’s legacy, nearly forgotten until he needed to be remembered… a weapon as strong as his fabled blade.

It is said that The Chosen King found The Warrior’s katana far across the sea, in the Cartanica district of ancient Tenebrae - why there was a tomb there, no one knows. Did Marcellus’ unending desire for revenge endear him to the Nox Fleurets? Was he simply buried where he was found, impaled on his own royal sword after turning it on himself? Did Sybil- his Oracle, who undoubtedly resented him for shirking his half of their shared duties - hold back his body from its return to Lucis as some sort of penance?

No one knows, not even the acolytes who pray to him before training even today. Not the Shields who look to his fierce, self-destructive love for his Queen to inspire their devotion to their king, not the smiths who pray to him for strength and a good forge or the jewelers who look to the ancient safety bit his followers developed for protection against any daemon who can steal life in an instant.

The Warrior was a king with a foreign sword and a foreign queen who died so far from his kingdom that he himself seemed a foreigner and yet, a King he stands even today.

**Author's Note:**

> Some notes:
> 
> \- I chose the name Marcellus for The Warrior because, like most names in XV, it is Latin and derives from the Roman god of war, Mars  
> \- I chose the name Sybil for the Oracle of his time because Greek and Roman sibyls were mouthpieces for the oracles  
> \- I chose the name Selinde for his Queen because it is a variant of the Greek and Roman Celina, which means "moon" because I like the idea that Oracles and the Tenebraen royal family favor celestial names as well so that they match with their Caelum counterparts  
> \- as much as I despise the "kill the love interest" plot device, what small lore we have about The Warrior indicates that he "changed forever when his beloved queen was killed". I wanted to explore a different reaction to loved ones dying than we see from Noctis, who shuts down, only to find motivation and inspiration to carry on from his friends
> 
> I am [tsunderestorm](twitter.com/tsunderestorm) on twitter ♥


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